Guide to Extended Latin characters used in African Languages

As mentioned in an earlier post, OCLC has been expanding its support for African languages in recent months. Here is a friendly guide to some of the special characters that are commonly found in practical orthographies of African print materials. Please have a look, and do not hesitate to post your questions!

QuickReferenceExtendedLatin_Africa

Visualizing some of the structure of new data models

>A small raft of documents have been produced lately as the library cataloging community heads toward implementation of new cataloging instructions and data models.  Here is one attempt at a visualization of the changes that are happening, although it doesn’t show everything and there are doubtless far better ways to illustrate it.  Nevertheless, here we go. 

NDMSO_PCC2012

Wheeeeee!

(Brief guide for the perplexed:  Numbers in circles 1-3 refer to classes of FRBR entities; circle 4 is for Annotations.  The BIBFRAME initiative would, depending on how you look at it, either split class 1 or merge entities from within it, while classes 2 and 3 are merged and would link to authority records via, e.g., URIs.  The column running down the middle with lines out from it represents what catalogers already work with, MARC, but shows how it aligns with FRBR entities following Tom Delsey’s 2006 report for NDMSO.)

(For the still perplexed:  This is an overview of the structure of legacy library data, with a newly proposed abstraction layer that surrounds it, rather than merely replacing the data format alone.)

Update: A version that will hopefully serve as more user-friendly, albeit a bit more rough, here.

Ina moƴƴi!

Some good news to pass along in the runup to ALA later this week:

1.)  The OCLC report to the Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials includes a note reiterating a statement given at ALC in Madison back in April:

“OCLC is making plans to add additional scripts during fiscal year 2013, including support for some African scripts.”

This is good news!  It will allow us to provide more accuracy in the bibliographic data we produce, linking more easily to fully digitized text, and improve access for users, through the use of Extended Latin and Ethiopic.

2.)  In the first set of five campaigns launched by Unglue.it (an initiative led by Eric Hellman, formerly of OCLC), at the top of the list for republication is Ruth Finnegan’s 1970 classic “Oral Literature in Africa”, which is so far drawing in 89 91 101 (!) % of the pledges it will need for its goal to be met.  The campaign closes in three days; if successful, it would mean free distribution of electronic copies of Finnegan’s work (558 p.), along with associated audio.  Please consider joining the effort to ‘unglue‘ it with your support!

The Once (and Future?) Kingdom

State of Intrigue, the title selected by Tayiru Banbera and David Conrad for recounting the Epic of Ségou, has perhaps never been more apt.  David Easterbrook at Northwestern forwarded an appeal for preservation of the manuscripts in Timbuktu to the ALC list yesterday.

Baba Mamadi Diané’s map of Guinea in N’ko script was posted earlier on this site; he also produced one for Mali:

Map of Mali, in N’ko script

For reference, an unofficial English translation of the declaration of independence of Azawad (ⴰⵣⴰⵓⴰⴷ), with a referring link to the original in French, can be found here.

Ready for RDA?

The announcement for RDA implementation came out last week.  We offer here some links to manifestations of various works to tune into, as you’re analyzing creation and production processes and the relations between entities therein.

A Few Maxims

Languages newly identified or rediscovered: Gbin, Zialo

One of the routine duties for catalogers of African materials is to review authority files on subject headings through participation in the SACO (Subject Authority COoperative) funnel, researching reference materials to decide whether there is warrant to revise an existing heading or establish a new one.

In the case of subject headings for languages, this ideally occurs in tandem with proposals to the classification schedule, such that a call number value assigned in the  053 for the authority heading for a language will likewise be proposed in ClassWeb.

Occasionally, it happens that the references themselves are being updated to reflect results from current field research.  This is the case recently with two Mande languages:  Gbin and Zialo, studied and re-analyzed by Denis Paperno and Kirill Babaev, respectively.  Gbin, now extinct, was documented by Maurice Delafosse but, until now, has been accounted for only as a cross-reference for the Beng language, and did not have an individual language code assigned to it in Ethnologue.  That will change soon.  Zialo was considered to have been a peripheral dialect of Loma, but Babaev’s work shows it to have lexical and morphological characteristics that are closer to Bandi and Mende.  It received a new code, zil, in ISO 639-3 after the most recent print version of the Ethnologue (16th, 2009) was published, and has had an authority record in LCSH since 2011.

E-books in African Languages

Current links to a handful of resources with links to books in African languages, some digitized and some born digital:

The Digital Somali Library at Indiana, and a hyperlinked Book of Genesis in Nuer.

The African Language Materials Archive, a collaborative project between DLIR and WARC.

SIL Bibliography (Country Index: Africa).

Check back for more; we’ll be eager to see this list grow!

 

 

Black History Month

In appreciation of February as Black History Month, here are a few links to online exhibits and upcoming events:

The University of Virginia hosts a database of emigrants and emancipators, tracing through the history of migration of US freedmen to Liberia.  The Virginia Historical Society has uploaded almost two thousand digitized historical documents relating to Virginians of African descent and the experience of slavery and emancipation, out of a total collection of an estimated eight million that remained unpublished.

Low Country Africana brings together research tools and resources covering black heritage in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Yale’s Public History Institute will host, with the co-sponsorship of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, an eight-day seminar in July, addressing issues of interpretation of African American history.

The Smithsonian also takes a look through an exhibit running through October 14th entitled “Paradox of Liberty”, about slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello.

And, on a much lighter note:  Bogolan!

Coptic Manuscripts and Papyri

A couple of the larger resources for searching materials in Coptic include APIS, housed at Columbia, for papyri, and CMCL, based in Rome, for manuscript material, including the works of Shenoute the Archimandrite.

They’re works in progress:  check if your institution’s collections have been fully uploaded.  US member institutions of APIS include UC-Berkeley, CSU-Sacramento, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Michigan, NYU, Penn, Princeton, SMU, Stanford, Union Theological Seminary, Washington State-Pullman, Wisconsin and Yale.  Members of CMCL include Columbia, Michigan, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and Yale.

There used to be a romanization table available for Coptic, included in the Greek table.  Since the updating of the Greek table, this is no longer the case, but a new table for Coptic is expected to be drafted later.  In the meantime, a guide can be found here.